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Up on a charge for being a typical child

There can be no point whatsoever in taking a little boy to court for calling another little boy names in the playground. It is insane. That ought to be glaringly obvious. Unfortunately it isn’t. Last week a 10-year-old boy found himself before a district court judge in Salford being prosecuted for allegedly calling an 11-year-old “Paki”, “Bin Laden” and “nigger”.

This was considered by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to be “a racially aggravated public order offence”. The boy denied the charge and claimed that the other boy had called him “white trash”. In any event, the boys are good friends now and play in each other’s houses, and the whole thing would have blown over long ago had not the forces of political correctness overcome common sense.

Fortunately there was one person in this astonishing story who did retain his common sense. Judge Jonathon Finestein angrily